


stare into the stars until we’re blind

by Livali



Series: when i dream of dying i never feel so loved [1]
Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, canon typical themes such as grief, i play around with metaphors like a frantic kazoo player, um. ummmm. this is sad. anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 13:34:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29333133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Livali/pseuds/Livali
Summary: Sonia’s heart beats again, feeble and weak, and she realizes: she’s an echo. This is a dream.She’d almost forgotten they can still happen, scattered across her consciousness, waiting for her. Ghosts. A curse. Chiaki. She’s gone, but she’s not gone. She’ll follow them (her) forever. The idea enthralls Sonia.Please, she thinks, please haunt me to death.or;Chiaki sits beside her, resting her chin on her palms. She says pointedly, “You’re sad.”
Relationships: Hinata Hajime/Komaeda Nagito, Nanami Chiaki/Sonia Nevermind
Series: when i dream of dying i never feel so loved [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2200005
Comments: 21
Kudos: 28





	stare into the stars until we’re blind

**Author's Note:**

> i--um. i've never written for sdr2 before but um. whatever. i wanted to try different povs since writing for thh all the time can be a bit draining, so here we go :]
> 
> insp: starset - where the skies end

Her parting words had been brave, no one can deny that.

But it doesn’t change the fact that she shouldn’t have died at all, and the loss of someone as brilliant and kind and compassionate as Nanami Chiaki from the universe should never go unpunished.

She refuses to suffer. It’s a start.

* * *

Time isn’t tangible, it is a thought, a force. Time is not even a real notion, but the idea’s circulated too long for anyone to correct any of it now, anyway; there are only moments and truths that burn in the blackness like the flicker of a flame, fog on a windowpane. Time is a being; a guide with its claws in her chest, encasing her, drowning her, propelling her forward. It’s an art humanity has somehow mastered into a dream. When she lives in time, she doesn’t live it in a direction; it’s more like a photo album, a vast array of pages and pages of pictures she sinks into.

Time is power, and beauty, and devastation, and rebirth. It is merciless, it is merciful. Sonia stared into it once, as a little girl, and the things she saw changed her forever: all of time and space, sitting under hearts, pouring out of mouths. Time invented knowledge. Knowledge precedes inception.

But inception cannot reverse time.

Sonia doesn’t know how long she wanders aimlessly around the island, or how many hours, days, weeks she spends walking from place to place, and Chiaki is everywhere.

The first time she runs into a reminder, she thinks about how easy it would be to stand still, let everything catch up to her, and finally, maybe, just die.

The only reason she decides against it is because that would go against everything Chiaki fought for, and there is no one who deserves to pay for her death.

She decides against it in favor of healing. Or as much as she can do so alone, at least.

She needs answers; she needs to know why, and how, and who; all of them are solved, but she doesn’t feel fulfilled. She can see no reason, no sense, and there is no peace to be found.

If Chiaki were in her place, Sonia reasons, she wouldn’t sit idly by in grief—she would want unity and the truth, just as she did for everyone else. (Not that—not that everyone didn’t think of the same! Of course, of course, but somehow Chiaki was always the first to come to mind.)

In the end, everyone, though pleasant and wonderful, is the same in the face of deceit and death, after all.

* * *

While the journey can never be linear, there needs to be a fixed point for restoration and recovery. She’d imagined it in the moment she went out of the pod, cemented it with the awakening of everyone else, except for one that never lived in the first place. (She remembers and knows she has fifteen classmates— _fifteen_ —any number otherwise felt so wrong, so nauseating.)

Time is never there when she wants it to be, and rarely, if ever, does it do the right thing; engineering the scheme to be rescued from their trapped dimension is proof enough. Look where it led them. Look who it hurt.

The beach seems a fine enough resting spot to be alone; she won’t waste time searching for a new one out of some strange poetic justice. She just needs a moment that will remain unchanged and infallible. She just needs a moment to call her own.

She decides the shade under the tree was nice, looking entirely the part. Perhaps she’ll stare into the sea for a while before embarking on this mission for retribution. Sonia sits; (staring, staring, staring) the ocean is quiet now, the reflection of the moon is clear.

Through her peripheral, she sees someone take a few steps out of the back, falter immediately, and turn around. She thinks nothing of it. Maybe they’ve forgotten something.

The person returns a few minutes later, walking casually over to her and tilts their head, “Hey?”

Her entire body stills, solid like a stone statue—that voice, anyone would know that voice better than any sound in the universe—

She’s terrified to glance up, but when she does, she’s completely unable to process what she’s seeing in front of her. Her heart flickers like lights going out, leaps into her throat like bile, sinks back into her stomach like weights.

Because it’s Chiaki.

And it’s really Chiaki, not just her face, which she sees on everyone, everywhere, because she’s all she sees, anymore—it’s her, the whole person, standing in front of her with her hair and the green jacket over her uniform. She stares. Chiaki raises an eyebrow.

“Hey?” She repeats again, slowly. Her face shows no flutter of recognition.

Sonia’s heart beats again, feeble and weak, and she realizes: she’s an echo. This is a dream.

She’d almost forgotten they can still happen, scattered across her consciousness, waiting for her. Ghosts. A curse. Chiaki. She’s gone, but she’s not gone. She’ll follow them (her) forever. The idea enthralls Sonia.

Please, she thinks, please haunt me to death.

She’s waiting for her to speak, her confusion growing. Sonia says, “Nanami-san.”

Chiaki smiles charmingly. “Oh, there you are. Hey.”

“Erm,” she says, stumbling over herself; there’s an overgrown forest in her mouth. “Are you—” she glances down, and looks up again (look at your peers in the eye when you talk to them, she remembers vaguely), sputters the first thing she thinks of, “—what are you doing here?”

“Finding you, I think,” she answers. “How about you though? What’re you doing out here? Sightseeing?”

“Sort of,” she replies immediately, and gawks at the moon until her vision blurs. Chiaki watches her patiently. Sonia says, “I am here because I had a plan.”

“Oh?” She asks, interested. “What kind of plan?”

“Ah, well,” Sonia smiles bitterly. “You don’t want to know, Nanami-san.”

Chiaki cocks her head to the side. Nothing Sonia will tell her can frighten her, or drive her away. She’s here for Sonia. Dreams are cruel like that. She replies, “A bad plan, then.”

“I suppose,” Sonia allows. The smell of the sea suddenly seems revolting. “Deserved, however.”

“Hm? By whose standards?” She questions with a tilt of her head.

“Certainly not anyone else’s,” Sonia answers amusedly, dazed, cataloguing her friend’s every movement like a recorder. Chiaki squints her eyes before she shifts back, eyebrow crooked quizzically.

There’s a moment of silence, the air rustles the earth. They stare at each other for a while, and Chiaki smiles at her. It rips her apart. She misses her so much.

Chiaki sits beside her, resting her chin on her palms. She says pointedly, “You’re sad.”

“Sad is rather an insult,” she replies with a sniff. “An understatement, Nanami-san.”

“Devastated,” Chiaki tries again. Her hair brushes her shoulder, head leaning slightly to the right.

“Perhaps.”

“Well,” she says with a tilt of her head, and Sonia grimaces. She’s got the same mannerisms and looks exactly like Chiaki, the real Chiaki, _their Chiaki_ ; she’s got everything about her down to a pat. What an echo, she thinks. A devastating, perfect echo. “What word would you use?”

She looks at the ocean, the reflection of the moon. The evening is darker. She glances back at Chiaki’s face and it’s much more painful to know it’s a hallucination. Her eyes are warm, her lips pink in a light smile. Sonia’s blood pools against her pulse points painfully, congealing as if she’s covered in bruises, like it’s damaging her body to live.

She says truthfully, “Traumatizing.”

The answer seems to strike dreamscape Chiaki. She pauses, and then takes a hold of her hand. She says softly, “I see.” She isn't smiling anymore.

“Nanami-san?” She asks, taken aback.

Chiaki says plainly, “Something terrible happened to you. Something terrible enough that you’re here. A place nobody should ever be, I think.”

Sonia blinks, “So why are you still here?”

She purses her lips. Her eyelashes dip against her cheekbone, Sonia follows the motion, admiring her freckles. “I guess I’ve been waiting for something, I know what it is now. I think.” She responds vaguely, and nothing else.

She doesn’t answer her. She doesn’t need to.

As if even in her dreams, she’d ever refuse her anything.

* * *

(It’s the last straw; she just wants to be alone.

Truthfully, that’s the last thing _anyone_ wants, since this was a game with a murder theme, after all.

She goes to the lobby to calm herself. How childish, she chides herself, almost mocking.

This is dangerous.

The voice is silent for a minute afterwards. There’s so much yet to come, she thinks, but laced with such finality and omnipotence that she senses her skin tingling, electricity like a current around her veins. She’s not sure anyone wants whatever is about to come.

And then she meets her.

Her name is Chiaki, the Ultimate Gamer, and immediately, she extends her friendship, there’s something about her: her curiosity, her cleverness, her quick wit and patience—see, everything about her is telling Sonia to hold on and not let go, and while surely that must be nice, the previous incidents obviously have the opposite effect—

Sonia can’t help it, and Chiaki says she likes her company, and in that moment she’s pretty sure the universe is conspiring against her.

_For_ , she thinks in a murmur, but she doesn’t quite understand it yet. _For you. Not against._

Chiaki is pretty. She notices that, too. She always knew what to say, knew what words to use to inspire, knew when to use them. _It’s like she was made for it—_ Sonia vocalized that thought out loud, and there’s not much to look back on this moment because she misses the sad gleam in Chiaki’s eyes as they smiled at each other and laughed.

And, well, there wasn't just her pep talks, of course. Chiaki made her feel so comfortable; as if she's breathing from someone else's skin. Sonia is perfectly aware she can’t catch social cues that well, or the specifics of Japanese slang, but Chiaki is so accommodating of her slights and errors that she can’t seem to stay away; they bumped hands once and then she’s—

Sonia had a thought once, too, about wanting to kiss her, which is why she doesn’t. She’s small, and she could have easily stopped her if she’d really been uncomfortable, but she doesn’t.

She's very fond of Chiaki; maybe it’s something else. If she’s being honest, she's fond of a lot of things—learning about different cultures and traditions, for a start, and the increment of discovery, though it’s never quite worked out for her in this context—and she’s experienced this chain of loss throughout this game enough times to trigger it like a tripwire. She could have been fond of something else, maybe, if she’d wanted to. But Chiaki had been clever and strong and brave—all of them always are, and she could have, but she didn’t. She cries when she’s revealed to be the traitor and she does everything she can to dismantle it; but then there’s Monokuma, Monomi, Chiaki—

You can’t do this to me, she thinks frantically. You can’t do this to me again—

This is not what it seems, is all the voice says, and then nothing.

They watch as the last tetris block falls and Chiaki opens her eyes, determined and _oh_ , this is everything they never wanted from her.

She had a flash of a dream after that, too—her lips are parted, red and flush against Chiaki’s. Her eyes dart, looking up, between her own. Sonia smiles, whispers quietly, “Will you come away with me?” Her voice sounds like a lover, words a caress in the air. She wants to tell her; you don’t understand, but you’re precious to me.

Bargains with death. Bargains with the mastermind. Bargains with the universe. They are owed this one thing. This _one_ thing, and that is their lives—

It doesn’t work like that, you know it doesn’t.

Chiaki dies anyway, but she saves their lives in doing so. She told them to fight, to live, and so they did.

Nanami Chiaki, dead. But not truly. Time is a thought, and it is a force. If she’s alive once, twice—there’s hope, there’s always hope—she could be out there, waiting and watching for them in the universe.)

* * *

Recovery is a fixed point. She decides to stargaze.

Only Hinata and Komaeda are there with her—it’s like those two were a package deal these days, Sonia thinks fondly. But this was no simple stargazing, apparently, because with these two involved it’s a competition; she pulls up what she remembers from her time traipsing across archives and libraries back in Novoselic, she names galaxies as they name many stars and planets, bickering all the while. They’re lying in the grass. Komaeda’s head is resting on Hinata’s stomach and Sonia sits steadily over a blanket.

“Sirius is renowned for being the brightest,” Komaeda says, pointing. “Canopus. Vega. Rigel.” He cranes his neck. “Ah, Hinata-kun? Do you want to add anything?”

“...Venus?” He completes awkwardly. Sonia nods approvingly, as he was right anyway. Komaeda only hums, but he's obviously amused.

“Arcturus,” she continues for them instead. “Procyon.”

“And our own sun, of course,” Komaeda interrupts. Hinata’s hands, entangled in his white hair, still. “Do you ever wonder why it does not have its own name when we technically name the suns we discover?”

Hinata begins scratching again, slowly, softly. Sonia smiles at the display. “Yes,” she answers sincerely. “I wonder about such things all the time, Komaeda-kun.”

“I see.” Komaeda smiles ruefully. "So you understand, Sonia-san."

Hinata only looks on.

Komaeda stares into space. The sky sits in Sonia’s chest. She feels like she can’t breathe. 

All those planets, she imagines Komaeda saying, and Hinata, still, looks on. All those stars. You’re the only one I want to see them with.

Well, you’re going to, he would probably say back. The earth revolves beneath them. He breathes him in. He finds the beauty of the most otherworldly galaxies in the scars and freckles on his skin, linking them like constellations. There are visions of touches along every ridge of his spine, traces the paths of his bones, filling them with stardust. Somewhere in time, a war is still being fought; but it is not here, and it is not theirs.

The silence is pregnant. She hesitates. She sees someone else in those voices, with the same love, the same care and the same warmth. Ghosts. Phantoms. Memories of times past.

No, she denies. No. That’s not it.

(There are so many things that will be here tomorrow, Sonia says. Time is still here tomorrow. I can sacrifice as many as I want. Time and space will still be here tomorrow. I will still be here tomorrow. But, Nanami-san, you—

I’ll still be here tomorrow, too.

I want all the days. Not just Wednesdays. Sundays and Mondays and Tuesdays. I want every day with you.

And I'll be there with you, too.

_No, you won't_.

Light quivers in her irises; Hinata and Komaeda look at her worriedly, but she ignores them. It’s so human, she thinks, to want time; such a human thing to wish for—)

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t know why I’m crying.”

She doesn’t know it, but Komaeda and Hinata thinks of a grave and the lives they had died, waiting to come back.

Hinata squeezes her shoulder and pulls her into a comforting embrace. “I do.”

* * *

Some creatures believe in a god; an immortal being, all-knowing and all-powerful, capable of destroying and creating worlds at will, inciting conflict for fun and growing gardens for pleasure; toying with the soul and heart of every individual, pushing them together, pulling them apart; experimenting with mass and matter and cause and effect like a tinkerer in a workshop.

But they don't believe in the right gods.

Some creatures don’t believe in any god at all; they’re not exactly right, too.

Time, with all its intents and purposes, is the closest thing to a god any being in the universe will ever see. Except a god is nothing without followers, and this one has all of them.

That’s what makes it sadder. Humanity leading a god by the hand. Anything could happen.

There’s a reason it comes with a warning: Anything could happen, you know. There is no control over it. Anything could happen to you and I, though born with the power of choice, am still limited. Can you accept that? We were told. We were told. _We were told._

So many deaths, but this is the least painful of them all. Sonia would have expected worse, but then, perhaps she’s had enough practice by now. Or maybe it’s just that her heart—there’s enough of it. It’s bloodied and scratched, but warm and alive. It’s easy to look beyond everything in the face in that, because they made it out of this, and that’s more than Chiaki could have ever asked for, more than anyone thought she’d get.

The universe is a small place if the people you love exist in it.

(I know you — you can all make it.)

In time, they will.

* * *

(When I say I loved her, she says, I mean—

I know, Sonia-san.

I loved her.

I know.)

**Author's Note:**

> this was probably an excuse to write soniaki AND komaeda + sonia interacting so uh. take it as you will. hopefully this was ok! thank you for reading.


End file.
